Last Saturday I and several friends got together for the first of hopefully many gaming sessions. I have a stack of games, both board and roleplaying, that I am hoping to review this summer, and this group has graciously stepped forward to help me.
We played a couple board games on Saturday to break the ice and get everyone in the mood, then worked on character creation for three roleplaying games. 

The hit of the evening, at least character-wise, was "Best Friends" by Gregor Hutton. In the game you play a group of teen girls who are all friends, but who hate one another for various reasons. Your abilities are based on these hatreds, so if everyone at the table hates you because you are pretty, you become the prettiest one at the table.

Since character creation was based upon everyone airing these hatreds, it was a lot of fun to see who hated whom and for what reason. We did have some problems with the game itself, mostly because we really weren't prepared for the free-form narrative style of the game. I think once we get a better plan of what we hope to accomplish with the game, and better understand the mechanics that will get us there, we will have a lot more fun.

Two other games we looked at are published by Evil Hat Productions: "Don't Rest Your Head" and "Spirit of the Century." Both use similar mechanics but to very different ends. "Don't Rest Your Head" is a horror game about insomniac superheroes, except replace "super" with "insane" and "heroes" with "morally ambiguous." It is a very grim, gritty and sometimes disturbing setting, and several of the players are really interested in getting into this game, myself included.

On the other end of the spectrum is "Spirit of the Century," which I have to admit is one I am really looking forward to playing. I am a huge fan of the pulp genre, and this game really lets you play out that over-the-top, two-fisted style of storytelling.

One game we didn't get to play, I'm sorry to say, was "Truth & Justice" by Chad Underkoffler. The plan was to play this game at last Saturday's gathering, but real life prevented me from preparing an adventure, working up characters, or pretty much doing any of the things I had hoped to do prior to the game. Because of that, and because I really want to have my ducks in order with T&J before I run a session, we opted to look at some other games first.

I have to say, the more I work with T&J and the PDQ system, the more I like it. The idea of being able to damage qualities, which are ideals, abilities or storylines surrounding a character, and generate storyhooks from that damage is a very cool idea. I heard Fred Hicks of Evil Hat fame talking about T&J on a podcast called Canon Puncture (check iTunes or find the feed here), and he described it as the Rhino punches Spider-Man, Spidey takes damage to the quality "Mary Jane," and all of a sudden Peter Parker's life sucks just a little bit more. 

Very cool.

I will be updating again at least once more this week and then after Saturday's session(s). 

Later

ME